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UK Independence sways British policy on migrants

Margaret Thatcher's biographer, Charles Moore, discusses the effect of the success of the UK Independence Party in local elections in Britain on government policy towards migrants.

Transcript

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Our guest tonight is prominent British conservative author and journalist Charles Moore. He's Margaret Thatcher's authorised biographer. Volume One: Not For Turning was recently published to widespread critical acclaim. By agreement with Margaret Thatcher, publication was only possible after her death because of the wealth of new private personal material that only he was able to access. Charles Moore joins us now from our London studio.

TONY JONES: Good evening. Will David Cameron's immigration crackdown outlined just a short time ago in the Queen's speech be enough to quieten the growing Tory backlash against the EU?

CHARLES MOORE: I don't think so, because there's an issue here about trust and I think a lot of people who feel strongly about these matters don't really believe David Cameron on this point. And the flow, the pressure is going against him. I mean, he's a skilful operator and he has - he's not a great euro enthusiast by any means, but I think he's in a weak position here. It's going against him.

TONY JONES: So they don't essentially believe his argument that he'll be able to renegotiate the treaty with the EU and come up with something that people will agree with?

CHARLES MOORE: Well I think the feeling is you can only conduct a successful negotiation if you really mean your threats. In other words, you have to know that if you don't get what you want, you will walk away. And people don't believe that David Cameron would walk away and would take Britain out of the European Union unless he got real gains. So they think there's an element of a feint here and they tend therefore to disbelieve him.

TONY JONES: What they appear to be doing too is shifting - or at least a fair proportion of voters shifting their attention to this UKIP party. We've just seen our background story there. They campaigned very heavily on the EU and immigration issue linked obviously. They're claiming the EU's open border policy will mean 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians, as they pointed out in their pamphlets, would have access to come and live in Great Britain. This seems to have hit home, hit a raw nerve in Britain. Will it spread beyond them? Will the Tories keep reacting to this?

CHARLES MOORE: I think it's quite a big issue for all the parties, actually. I think it makes it difficult for Labor and the Liberals as well. The biggest feeling that UKIP taps into, apart from straightforward euro scepticism, is the idea that really all the political parties are much the same and that they're all part of a unrepresentative political class who say things but don't really do things. And UKIP is therefore the voice, or trying to make itself the voice of the ordinary person who's irritated by all of this.

TONY JONES: Australia's last conservative Prime Minister John Howard virtually won an election with the line, "We will decide who comes into this country and the manner in which they come." Do you suspect that might get some sort of play in Great Britain?

CHARLES MOORE: Very much so. But your country is blessed with being able to govern itself, which ours isn't fully because of our membership of the European Union. And so it's perfectly true that what the great John Howard promised no British Prime Minister can promise while we're in the European Union because there has to be, under European law, an open borders for all members of the European Union. So, actually there's very little that the Government can do under present rules and that is what upset so many people.

TONY JONES: How much of a game changer was it when Margaret Thatcher's old ally and friend - at least till the end, that is - Tory grandee Lord Lawson decided to weigh in and say that Britain should get out?

CHARLES MOORE: Well it certainly makes a difference, because even though eruoscepticism has grown tremendously in the last 25 years, it's still considered a wicked thing to say by many people that you should actually get out. And so for a respectable and senior person like Nigel Lawson to say that does make a difference. It shifts the argument on a lot.

TONY JONES: It does. I mean, he was the person who actually coined the phrase "Thatcherism" in the first place. Both he, however, and Margaret Thatcher both voted in 1975 to join the European community. Do you think Margaret Thatcher grew to think that was a bad idea?

CHARLES MOORE: Yeah, by the way, they didn't vote to join it; they voted to stay in it, which is a rather difference proposition.

CHARLES MOORE: But, yes, I think that - well in fact I know that Margaret Thatcher, once she'd left office, was disillusioned with the European Union. And indeed - I mean, she became disillusioned while in office, but after leaving it she did come to believe that we would be better off out.

TONY JONES: Your biography delves into Margaret Thatcher's earliest life, and just on this issue of immigration, it looks at her earliest express thoughts on immigration. And I was surprised to find that back in 1968 when Enoch Powell made his famous "Rivers of Blood" speech in which he warned that Britons in 20 years would reach a situation where, "... the black man will have the whip hand over the white man," that actually Margaret Thatcher was in complete agreement with him.

CHARLES MOORE: Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say she was in complete agreement, but she did not want Ted Heath to throw him out of the shadow cabinet. That was the issue. And she did not want Powell cast out into the wilderness. She had sympathy with his position and she said that to Ted Heath, but she wasn't very senior and he did throw him out and eventually Powell left the Tory Party altogether eventually and actually that contributed to Heath's ultimate defeat. She was quite a hawk on immigration, though she had a great belief in the virtues of aspirational immigrant culture. So she wasn't - she didn't want a sort of whites-only Britain or anything like that, but she simply was worried about numbers and she made a famous remark about a year or two before she came into office for the first time about not wanting the country to be "swamped" and how people were worried by being "swamped" - she used that word. And it resonated because immigration was very high at that point and the economic circumstances of lower paid workers were poor, and of course that's the situation we're in again now.

TONY JONES: Sure. I mean, I won't dwell on this, but in connection with Enoch Powell's speech, you do quote a journalist as saying she said to him, "Oh, I agree with every word he said."

CHARLES MOORE: Ah, yes. Um, I mean, she wasn't 100 per cent consistent on that point and I think she regretted Enoch's form of expression, the rather extreme way he - the sort of extreme phrases he used. But she did certainly agree with Powell about the danger of mass immigration if it was unchecked.

TONY JONES: Now as the authorised biographer, as I said at the beginning, you've been able to assemble a remarkable body of new material, especially about the young Margaret Thatcher, including from letters to her sister and so on. Tell us what you found to be the most significant new insight?

CHARLES MOORE: Well in terms of the early life, these letters that she wrote to her only sister - she had no brothers - to her only sister Muriel are a complete revelation. There's nothing like this at all apart from this. And they show you the young Margaret, the real human being, the girl in Grantham, the student at Oxford, the young industrial worker, the parliamentary candidate and the young barrister. And of course, they show things like - I mean, she was on the whole a truthful lady, but she always denied that she had boyfriends before she married Denis, and I found quite definitely from her letters at least three.

TONY JONES: Yes. Well indeed - if I could I just pause you there for a moment. One of them appears to have been a lover actually, which would have queen quite racy in those days, you would have thought.

CHARLES MOORE: I don't think one can establish absolutely for definite what the situation was, but there's no doubt that there was a man called Robert Henderson who was a rather distinguished and was doctor twice her age who had invented the iron lung in Britain, and she met him in Dartford, the constituency where she was the Tory candidate, and he was a serious boyfriend and she was very fond of him and undoubtedly there were serious thoughts of marriage. But I think in the end the age difference was too great. And at the same time, Denis was in the background, and at the same time also actually another chap was in the background who she - a farmer who she decided not to marry, but passed on to her sister, who duly married him. So you see the young Margaret, 23, 24 years old, juggling these things. And finally Denis proposed to her and she didn't - as Denis said to me, she didn't leap at it. She thought hard about it and decided it was the right decision and subsequent history proved that it was.

TONY JONES: I'll come back to that in a moment, but just to sort of go back once again, I was surprised - and this is in the period when she's at school and she's trying to get into university, I was surprised to find that she was effectively a draft dodger.

CHARLES MOORE: This is technically correct. But I looked into this a lot and there seemed to be no stigma about this in regard to women. Of course women didn't serve in combat positions. But what happened was - I think the way it worked was that if you went to university over the age of 18, you were supposed to go straight into various forms of women's services before you did your university time.

TONY JONES: This being 1943, of course, when the War was still raging.

CHARLES MOORE: Yes. And Margaret went up in 1943 just narrowly avoiding this because of her birthday being October, the term at Oxford starting in October. And she therefore was able not to be called up in this way. My understanding is from my studies that this was - women went to considerable lengths to do what Margaret did. It wasn't thought to be - obviously evading conscription, for a man, trying not to fight was considered a serious moral wrong, but this was not so in this particular case.

TONY JONES: One other extraordinary ...

CHARLES MOORE: In a woman's case.

TONY JONES: ... extraordinary gem you uncovered was that when she won the contest to be the Tory candidate for Finchley, it was actually as a result of positive discrimination, if we can put it like that, but also in fact of voter fraud.

CHARLES MOORE: Well, so it would seem. I actually got this information on the day after Lady Thatcher died. I'd been working on it for some time, but I finally came through with it. The chairman at the time, the conservative chairman, she had got through to the final round. It was a playoff between her and a man to be candidate. And the chairman came back home that night and said to his son, "You know, Margaret didn't really win. The other chap one by one vote, but I preferred her and I thought he's got a silver spoon in his mouth, he'll get a candidacy somewhere else. She's a woman, she's got young children, she won't. I want her." So he said he'd "lost" two of the votes for the man and chose Margaret. I don't believe she ever knew this in her whole life, but she did get selected on a fraud.

TONY JONES: There certainly doesn't seem to be any evidence she knew about it. Now her extraordinary drive to make it in politics had some bad consequences for her family - coming back to that. Her relationship with her children seemed to have been rather distant. Her relationship with her mother was non-existent. And you reveal something which I don't think we ever found out before, which is that Denis, her husband, actually had a nervous breakdown early on in the marriage, left home and went to South Africa for some time and possibly even considered divorce, which you'd imagine would have ruined her career.

CHARLES MOORE: It might have done. This was in 1964 and she had just finished her first stint as a junior minister. The Tories had just lost the general election of that year. Denis told me that he was in that thing that middle aged men are often in which you've got a lot of dependents 'cause you've got your children and in his case his aged mother and his divorced sister. And he was - his business wasn't doing well, he was working too hard, and by his own account, drinking too hard. And I think he felt pretty desperate. Margaret also very tired after her time as a minister. And I think Denis resented the sense that there was no time, that things were so tough, that his wife couldn't give more to family life. And he left. He didn't walk out on her. He didn't say, you know, "I'm off." He said, "I need to go away and think about everything." And he went to South Africa where he often did business and where he had relations and he thought about everything for a couple of months. And he came back and all was well.

But there was a serious possibility that he might not have come back. It was on the cards. And Mrs Thatcher confirmed to me that it was a very worrying time and a difficult one. They made the decision to make it work, and it did work, and actually, it worked better as time went on because Denis retired at just about when she became conservative leader and he actually threw himself into being the supportive spouse. So I think really his finest hour was when she reached the top and he was there and able to give her good advice on business, on politics, on judging human beings, 'cause he was better at that than she was. And ...

TONY JONES: OK, tell us - we've reached that point - we're sort of running out of time, which I'm really sorry about because this is fascinating. But we've reached that point where she does make the leadership, she become the Conservative leader, and you describe a truly wonderful moment there when Geoffrey Howe has tears in his eyes and you talk about this - the oldest, the grandest and perhaps the stuffiest party can hardly believe what it's done. Tell us about that moment.

CHARLES MOORE: Well, yes, 'cause of course it wouldn't seem at all likely that they'd choose a woman, and indeed they wouldn't have chosen a woman if everything had been going well. She's very much the candidate to deal with a huge failure. And at this moment she came in, she'd been chosen and she was surrounded by what they call the "Knights of the Shires", the sort of country gentlemen who were the backbone of the Tory MPs and there she was looking frail and small and female and this made Geoffrey Howe cry. And she sort of appealed to them. She said, you know, "I'm a weak woman. Look after me," was the essentially the message. Weak was something she wasn't, but it was useful device.

TONY JONES: A final question, because we are just about out of time, but that weak woman, not weak at all in fact, who surrounded herself by men, actually, for most of her political career, not women, as it happens, she did become the Iron Lady. What was the key element of that? What do you think made her what she was?

CHARLES MOORE: Well there's something deep in her character. But I think she knew how to exploit the apparent disadvantage of being a woman. And she knew how to turn the whole argument round, turn it all on its head. She believed - she didn't believe in the equality of the sexes, she believed in the superiority of women. And she wanted to conquer everything that men thought they owned, which is money, defence and war and power, and so she wanted to get all those traditionally non-women things and grab them and control them and this she succeeded in doing and they were baffled, they didn't really know what to do about it.

TONY JONES: Charles Moore, we could probably go through the other 600 or 700 pages with some ease and talk to you about that. We've run out of time. But hopefully we can come back to you or get you to come back when Volume Two is published, because it's a fascinating Volume One. Volume Two looks to be a very interesting period as well, so hopefully we'll see you again.